Obtaining a Monsoon Account

To obtain an account on Monsoon, you must either be faculty, or a student being sponsored by a faculty conducting research at NAU. Contingent upon administrative approval, NAU affiliates may also obtain a Monsoon account.

Before proceeding with the account creation process, read the policies for using Monsoon.

Account Creation Process

Our account creation process consists of a couple of steps, which are normally pretty painless!

Firstly, you’ll want to request an HPC account. The form can be picky about the browser that is viewing it, so please ensure you are using a modern supported browser. While filling out the form you must specify a faculty sponsor; this sponsor will need to approve this request.

• Faculty are not be required to specify a sponsor
• NAU affiliates need a type of affiliate account that includes an NAU domain account. Collaborative Campus Associate is generally suggested.

Once the form has been approved, Monsoon staff will create a provisional account, usually within 24 hours.  (Affiliate accounts will take additional time to progress through the process due to them requiring CIO approval.) When the account is created, a welcome email will be sent to your primary NAU email address, and you’ll have two weeks to validate your account through the self-paced workshop process.

Self-paced Workshop Process

After the provisional account has been created, you will have two weeks to validate your account by completing our introductory orientation training.

1. 1. 1. NAU’s AnyConnect VPN: required to access both Monsoon, and workshop media, from off-campus.
      2. Review the introductory workshop media and complete the four exercises.
         • Slides: Our primary workshop resource. [PDF; required]
         • Zoom workshop recording: A recording of recent “live” workshop (Note: onscreen annotations to communicate recent changes since that workshop). [MP4; supplementary]
         • OnDemand web-portal walk-through video: A walk-through of the features of the OnDemand portal. [MP4; supplementary]
      3. Familiarize yourself with our interactive support options and their schedules:
         • weekly Zoom-based office hours
         • monthly in-person “coffee hours”
         • semi-monthly topical workshops
      4. Validate your account so that it doesn’t expire, using the output generated by the workshop exercises. The validation process is explained in the next section.

Code Validation

Because the introductory workshop is now fully self-guided, a user is able to immediately self-validate their account upon completion of the required exercises.

To access the validation binary, and complete the validation you will need to execute the ‘confirm_user’ command (which is part of the ‘workshop’ module) and paste in the individual codes obtained from the exercises, as demonstrated here:

$ module load workshop
$ confirm_user
username: abc123
exercise 1 code: 104b0c020063c4b666c376480260f14c
exercise 2 code: b542e82782e8af2663f243d39ec1751c
exercise 4 code: 0659f7fc71a24040c54e8a69c55a38bc
You've successfully confirmed your account!
Press Enter to Exit


Account Expiration

Your HPC account will be disabled when you no longer have an active affiliation with NAU. This includes losing student, employee, or affiliate status. Your HPC account data will be retained for 6 months after losing affiliation with NAU.